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Watch trailer on Steam ↗Zenith Expanse
Glitched Phoenix Studios · Published by Glitched Phoenix Studios · Official site ↗
Content notice: This game contains mature themes typical of colony simulation games. Colonists may engage in violence (depicted through text descriptions, not visually), use fictional recreational substances, gamble on fauna races, and form romantic/sexual relationships (implied through journal entries only, no visual content). The game also features occasional profanity and the ability to engage in illegal activities such as smuggling. All content is presented in a non-graphic, text-based manner.
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
Command a damaged scout ship in a living space colony survival sim. Wake your crew from cryostasis, secure water and food, build fragile settlements, trade or smuggle between factions, and survive the stories that emerge.
Indie, Simulation, Strategy, Early Access · 2026 · More free games
About this game
A damaged scout ship. One awake crew member. Two lives locked in cryostasis.
In 2420, humanity finally reached beyond its home systems. The warp engine opened the way to distant worlds, and the Zenith Expanse program sent small scout vessels ahead of the larger expedition.
Whisper-1 was one of them.
It was not a colony ark. It was a fragile recon ship with a crew of three, enough to scan planets, prepare a first outpost, and prove that life could survive where the maps ended. Then the power failed.
Most supplies were lost. The water recycler contaminated almost everything it touched. Two crew members remain sealed in emergency cryostasis, and the ship AI refuses to wake them until survival projections improve.
Your first job is simple: keep everyone alive long enough to deserve a future.
Survive the first days
Zenith Expanse is a single-player space colony survival sim where your expedition begins small, vulnerable, and badly underprepared.
Scan nearby worlds to find planets worth risking a landing.
Secure water and food before the ship AI allows the rest of your crew to wake.
Hunt, harvest, craft, and build your first survival chain from whatever the planet gives you.
Choose when to settle down and when to stay mobile aboard Whisper-1.
Build a colony that has to live with your decisions
Your colony is not just a base. It is a fragile system of people, supplies, buildings, ships, weather, wildlife, morale, debt, and bad ideas.
Construct water pumps, crop fields, workshops, kitchens, storage, defenses, and settlement infrastructure.
Turn raw materials into meals, tools, medicine, weapons, ship modules, and trade goods.
Manage food, water, morale, health, fatigue, workload, and the slow cost of poor planning.
Automate recurring work orders and ship routes once your colony grows too complex to babysit by hand.
Your crew are people, not counters
Colonists have skills, traits, relationships, needs, injuries, loyalties, grudges, and opinions about your leadership. They can carry the colony through a crisis, make one worse, or quietly become the reason everything still works.
Assign work based on skill, health, location, and availability.
Handle illness, wounds, stress, morale drops, and social friction.
Watch personal history and relationships shape the stories that emerge.
Decide who rests, who works, who leads, and who gets sent into danger.
Explore living planets
The worlds of Zenith Expanse are not static loot boxes. Planetary ecosystems react to climate, seasons, settlements, migration, food chains, and your interference.
Discover alien flora and fauna across deserts, jungles, ice fields, oceans, caves, ruins, and wrecks.
Hunt, trap, fish, harvest, research, relocate, or exploit local life.
Survive storms, temperature swings, hostile wildlife, bad terrain, and poor expedition planning.
Learn which worlds can sustain a colony and which ones only look peaceful from orbit.
Trade, smuggle, and pick sides carefully
You are not alone in the Expanse. Factions, patrols, settlements, companies, traders, pirates, and political rivalries shape the economy around you.
Buy low, sell high, and watch prices shift with supply, demand, conflict, and opportunity.
Move cargo between systems, settlements, and ships.
Smuggle contraband for high profit and higher risk.
Build reputation with factions, anger their rivals, and live with the diplomatic mess that follows.
A sandbox built for stories nobody scripted
Zenith Expanse is not about reaching a single victory screen. It is about surviving long enough for your expedition to become a story.
A scout ship becomes a base. A base becomes a colony. A colony becomes a liability, a business, a political actor, a home, or a very expensive mistake.
Procedural star systems and planets.
Colony survival, crafting, resource logistics, and ship operations.
Dynamic events, quests, crises, and faction consequences.
Steam Workshop support and the Let Me Cook modding framework.
Keep the crew alive. Wake the sleepers. Build something that can survive the Zenith Expanse.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
- Processor: Intel Core i5-4460 / AMD FX-6300
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: GTX 750 Ti / RX 460
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 10 GB available space
Recommended
- OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
- Processor: Intel Core i5-8400 / AMD Ryzen 5 2600
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: GTX 1060 6GB / RX 580
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 10 GB available space
Supported Languages
*languages with full audio support
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
Demo Patch 0.1.4 - Demo Feedback, Trading, Fuel, and Economy Tuning
This update is focused heavily on feedback from recent demo playtests. The big goal was to make the early game less brittle, make different playstyles more viable, clean up some rough UI/economy issues that were making trading and settlement play feel confusing or too easy to exploit.Onboarding no longer pushes players into founding a settlement as the only “real” path forward. You can now progress through alternate objectives such as trading or exploration, so merchant-style and scout-style runs should feel more natural.Fuel also got an important fallback loop: colonists now generate biowaste, and biowaste can be converted into emergency Helion. Combined with better fuel hints and more reliable early-game fuel access, getting stranded should be less sudden and less dependent on pure RNG.Trading received a larger pass. The trading screen now has a Buy/Sell switch, category filtering, search, clearer price information, and better state handling after transactions. Market demand has also been expanded so more items have somewhere useful to go. I also fixed confusing pricing displays, including separating base unit value from base stack value.The economy has been rebalanced across several areas. Scan/research data rewards, ship module prices, mineral prices, and supply/demand effects were adjusted to reduce obvious money-printing loops while keeping trading useful.Other notable changes:Added in-game save deletion.Improved save safety and old-save loading.Increased shipyard availability.Adjusted difficulty starts, wages, and starter ship modules.Reduced water extraction output.Added better event cooldowns and conditions.Toned down unfair early lethal events.Fixed several trading modal, order, and interrupted ship action edge cases.This patch should make the demo less “colony trap or merchant exploit simulator” and more “pick your poison, survive the stars.”Have fun!SzymonRead full article on Community Announcements (szymon)Patch NotesOfficial
Demo update #3 is live!
Hey folks! Big one this time. I've been heads-down on making your first hours smoother and giving you actual reasons to fly around the galaxy. Here's the rundown.Escort missions are a real thing nowThis was the headliner. When you take an escort contract, you're now protecting an actual ship that flies with you, warps with you, and can absolutely get blown up if you slack off. Pirates will ambush your convoy mid-jump (with a sane cap, I'm not a monster :D), prioritize the ship you're guarding, and warp out gracefully instead of magically vanishing. Lose the escort and the mission fails - you'll know about it. Get it home safe and you get paid.Missions & contracts overhaul- New Contracts panel with clearer requirements and decision hooks, so you actually understand what you're signing up for.- Mission deadlines now scale with distance. Long-haul delivery across multiple warp jumps? You get the time you deserve. No more impossible runs.- Mission route preview now shows you exactly where you're going with a click-to-locate affordance.- You get a notification on every mission completion path now, properly localized.First-session clarity (a.k.a. "wait, what do I do?")- When onboarding wraps up, the mission board lights up with a smoke signal so you've got an obvious next step.- New game setup, resource tooltips, and decision feedback copy all got a clarity pass. Less guessing, more playing.- Surface actions now show progress feedback so you're not staring at a colonist wondering if anything's happening.Miscellanous- Fade-to-black transitions for "go to" jumps instead of the camera flying you across the system. Snappier and less nauseating.- A pile of mini-map and system map fixes during warp and in planet/sub-hex views.- 100 new flavour lore notes scattered around the galaxy, plus new message-themed points of interest to find them at.- Dead Drops now carry thematic loot - cash, intel, contraband. Worth the detour.- Fixed a bunch (22+) of POI and event outcomes that didn'...Read full article on Community Announcements (szymon)Patch NotesOfficial
Demo Update #2: clearer first minutes, better planet markers, and more
Hey, Explorers! I’ve just pushed another demo update. This one is not a “big new content” patch. It is mostly a “the demo should stop fighting you while you’re trying to learn it” patch. :D After the first release I got a lot of useful feedback about the opening minutes being confusing, especially around scanning, finding resources, landing, understanding what the planet actually contains, and coming back to a save without losing the thread. So this update focuses heavily on that. What changedThe first steps should be easier to follow now. Early onboarding now does a better job of pointing you toward the actual next target instead of just telling you what to do in text. Water and fauna objectives now have clearer targeting. The game can now guide you toward specific planet/sub-hex locations for early survival objectives, which should make “find animals” and “secure water” much less vague. The starter planet is less chaotic. I changed the demo starter planet logic so it should avoid weird starts like ocean-heavy worlds with mostly aquatic life, barren planets, or ecosystems that make the first survival steps unnecessarily awkward. Planet markers got a big readability pass. Resource, flora, fauna, POI, ship, and settlement markers were redesigned to be more compact and readable. Empty labels should no longer appear just to add noise. The planet legend is now more useful. Category pills such as Minerals, Flora, Fauna, POI, and Ships can now work more like quick filters, helping you focus on what you’re actually looking for. Player settlements should stand out better. The player colony marker now gets clearer treatment instead of blending into NPC settlements. Scanning planets should be easier to understand. Scan progress is more visible, and completed/stale scan orders should be less likely to block a new scan attempt. Save/load got more hardening. I fixed several cases where loaded saves could restore UI, resources, quest targets, crew state, or order state incorrectl...Read full article on Community Announcements (szymon)Patch NotesOfficial
Demo Update #1 is live
Hey Explorers! After the demo went live, I got a pretty solid dose of feedback about things that felt confusing, frustrating, unclear, or just not quite right yet. I’ve been watching Steam, Reddit, Discord, and reviews, and I put together a very concrete list of things to improve. Today I released a new version of the demo focused on the issues that came up most often. Here’s the high-level changelog compared to the first public demo build. What changed Removed the real-time demo timer. The demo is now limited by in-game Sols instead of real-world time.Hardened a bunch of save/load edge cases. Improved the first minutes of onboarding so the opening flow is clearer and less overwhelming.Reworked early quest guidance, the current mission pill, quest tooltips, and next-target markers.Improved the starter system and starter planet rules.Added a more natural starter ecosystem setup.Added a preview version of custom crew creation during new game setup.Added experimental UI scaling from 90% to 110%.Added scan-complete auto-pause support and other small pacing tweaks.Improved comms handling, including the comms modal and quick info messages from player ships.Cleaned up several HUD and layout areas. Fixed bugs around failed orders, loading screens, cryostasis state after load, colony health, resource warnings, planet labels, scan markers, and various UI panels.Improved performance and stability in galaxy generation, planet sampling, texture/cache handling, and demo startup flow. There are also two experimental features in this update. The first one is UI scaling. For now the range is fairly small, from 90% to 110%. I checked most of the important screens at 110% and didn’t spot any major issues, but that does not mean I didn’t miss some cursed little panel hiding in the depths of the UI that overlaps something or crawls under the top or bottom bar. If you notice anything like that, please let me know. :D The second one is something I originally wanted to have ready for the d...Read full article on Community Announcements (szymon)AnnouncementsOfficial
The Zenith Expanse demo is out now
Hi everyone, This is a strange and very good sentence to finally type: The Zenith Expanse demo is now available on Steam. You can start a colony on the edge of known space, scan nearby stars, land on alien planets, gather resources, build your first settlement, send colonists into questionable situations, and discover how quickly a reasonable plan can become a small administrative disaster. The demo is a focused slice of the game. It is about the opening stretch: exploration, survival, first colony setup, early decisions, and the first signs that the frontier is not especially interested in being convenient. It is also still a demo. There will be rough edges. Some systems are still growing into themselves. Some colonists may make choices that suggest the training program was more optimistic than effective. But the heart of the game is there: build a fragile colony, explore strange planets, manage people, resources, and consequences, try to keep everyone alive long enough to pretend this was the plan. If you try it, thank you. If you wishlist the full game, extra thank you. If something breaks, tells a weird story, or makes you say “wait, why did that happen?”, I genuinely want to hear about it. Welcome to the frontier. Please return the equipment in usable condition. Have fun, SzymonRead full article on Community Announcements (szymon)
